North Korea stages nighttime military parade but machines take priority over missiles

The pageant featured rifle-carrying students, personnel in gas masks and orange protective suits, and mechanised paramilitary units

North Korea often celebrates major state anniversaries by rolling out thousands of goose-stepping troops and its most advanced military hardware

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North Korean officials salute the country’s flag during the military parade at Kim Il-sung Square in Pyongyang. Photo: EPA

Published: 6:30am, 9 Sep 2021Updated: 12:53pm, 9 Sep 2021

North Korea put tractors and fire engines on show rather than the more usual tanks and missiles at a parade in Pyongyang early on Thursday, the nuclear-armed nation’s third procession in less than a year.

Pyongyang has continued to pursue its nuclear weapons and ballistic missile programmes – for which it is internationally sanctioned – during the diplomatic engagement of recent years and often uses military parades to show off its latest developments.

At the last one in January – days before Joe Biden’s inauguration as US president – submarine-launched ballistic missiles rolled through Kim Il-sung Square in front of a grinning Kim Jong-un, with the official KCNA news agency describing them as the “world’s most powerful weapon”.

But Thursday’s “paramilitary and public security forces” event was significantly less assertive, including detachments from the railways ministry, Air Koryo and the Hungnam Fertiliser Complex, according to KCNA.

The pageant featured rifle-carrying students, personnel in gas masks and orange protective suits, and mechanised paramilitary units, with none of the participants or audience wearing face masks, images showed.

The biggest weapons on display were small artillery pieces dragged by tractors, with KCNA saying they were driven by cooperative farm workers “to pound the aggressors and their vassal forces with annihilating firepower in case of emergency”.